of his praise, Claudian equals the contemporary prose panegyrists, and surpasses the early Alexandrian and most of the later Roman poets. Among his miscellaneous poems none is so well known in modern times, or so modern in tone, as the brief elegy of only twenty-two lines, on an old man of Verona, who never left his suburb, who pressed his staff upon the same sand in which he had crept, counted his years by the changes of crops, not by consuls, and saw the trees grow old which he had seen as little sprouts. The advantages of a quiet, humble life have seldom been more charmingly set forth than in this poem. With all his learning, skill, and genuine poetic inspiration, Claudian is still the belated singer of a worn-out empire and a dying civilization. Rome was no longer the mighty and unquestioned ruler of the world. The poet whose chief task it was to sing the praises of Stilicho, and spread the glory of his victories, must needs shut his eyes, so far as possible, to the evident decay, but he could not simulate utter blindness. In the beginning of his poem on the war with Gildo, Claudian shows that the feebleness and old age of Rome were not hidden from him. He describes the personified city, the goddess Roma, as she approaches Olympus to beg for aid against Gildo, whose revolt, involving the loss of the African grain supply, threatened to expose the city to famine: Her voice is weak, and slow her steps; her eyes Deep sunk within; her cheeks are gone; her arms Are shrivelled up with wasting leanness. On Her feeble shoulders hardly can she bear Her tarnished shield; she shows from loosened helm Her hoary locks, and drags a rusty spear.[137] Even the poet who sang of Rome’s victories could portray her in such terms as these. Yet the tradition of Roman greatness still survived. [Sidenote: Namatianus.] In the year 416, Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, a Gaul who had risen to the position of _præfectus urbi_ at Rome, was obliged to return to Gaul to attend to his property, which had been laid waste by the Goths. The journey was the occasion of a poem in two books, most of which is preserved. It is written in elegiacs, with much still and feeling. Many episodes and descriptions are inserted in the narrative, but no passage is so striking as that in which the traveller, passing out from the Ostian gate, addresses the imperial city: Wide as the ambient ocean is thy sway, And broad thy empire as the realms of day; Still on thy bounds the sun’s great march attends, With thee his course begins, with thee it ends. Thy strong advance nor Afric’s burning sand, Nor frozen horrors of the Pole withstand; Thy valor, far as kindly Nature’s bound Is fixed for man, its dauntless way has found. All nations own in thee their common land, And e’en the guilty bless thy conquering hand; One right for weak, for strong, thy laws create, And bind the wide world in a world-wide State.[138]